Wednesday, September 3, 2014

The Current State of My Art

As the leaves on the trees wither, it confirms the stirring
I feel. A season has come and gone. The winds of change press heavily at my
back.

For the past seventeen years, I’ve educated my only
son. And though his needs morphed and
lessened as he grew, we’ve been daily companions since his birth. It was his season to move on, and now, it
becomes mine.

At first his absence didn’t seem that different from the annual
week at camp. His father and I have more
time together, always a good thing. But each day, the void widens further,
stretching into an entity. Today, I
stand on the edge of the damn thing, knowing I have to fill it or risk falling
in.

When my son was five, he declared that he no longer wanted
to be cute.

He wanted to be funny. I expect his roommates will appreciate his
mature wit. Personally, I’m jonesing for
a hit.

So I write. I rub the dogs’ tummies. I rearrange the areas we shared in pursuit
of learning. He no longer needs the
guidelines I gave him for research papers. His professors will supply their own. For class work, we replaced his clunky laptop
with something sleek and portable, and the old one will be relegated to some
mundane chore around the house. With
each new chapter of my son’s life, we created our own stories to complement the
thousand books now huddled on my shelves.

His educational Sherpa, I guided his trek from phonics to
physics. I helped him conquer the
fundamentals, reassuring him during the dark days of Algebra 1 that he really
was a math guy. While through simple
conversation, his father incited my son’s fascination with science. How does electricity work? What exactly is gravity? Is light a wave or a particle? We both
remember his deep disappointment when he learned that humans can’t really
travel to distant planets as they do in Star
Trek.

We didn’t know if he was a boy or girl until the surgeon
removed him from my weary womb on the day of his birth. Eleven minutes past
midnight, my husband followed the nurse to make certain they tagged the right
child. I was shaking so violently from
the epidural, I was afraid to hold him.
But his warmth radiated through my skin, soothing me like a magical
balm. Now I miss the quick bump of his fist.

I enjoyed a dynamic career before my son came along. I traveled, broke barriers, built products.
Morning sickness haunted my last business trip to Japan. And during the time we shared a library, he
watched me launch other ventures. But no
matter what I do from here, he will always be my finest work. I taught a boy how
to read, how to write, and, ultimately, how to divide.

Helen Hanson works in the high-tech sector, which informs her geeky thrillers. According to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, she wrote # 1 bestselling technothriller, 3 LIES, with “an artistry that is hard to deny.”

Currently, she’s writing a sequel to 3 LIES. You can find her thrillers in the usual places. And you can find her at HelenHanson.com coddling a goblet of red.

A moving blog, Helen. It brought back memories of my own son when he took off for the University of Chicago. He now lives in Chicago with his wife and two small children. The boy disappears into the man. The birth of my grandson brought my boy back in some powerful and poignant ways. Thanks for sharing this glimpse into your heart.

With a twelve-year-old son of my own, your essay pierced my heart this morning. You reminded me to remain grateful even as we both struggle with homework that involves dividing compound fractions. It sounds like you raised a wonderful young man.